Paragraphs

I sure do love little reminders about HTML semantics, particularly semantics that are tougher to commit to memory. Scott has a great one, beginning with this markup:

<p>I am a paragraph.</p>
<span>I am also a paragraph.</span>
<div>You might hate it, but I'm a paragraph too.</div>
<ul>
  <li>Even I am a paragraph.</li>
  <li>Though I'm a list item as well.</li>
</ul>
<p>I might trick you</p>
<address>Guess who? A paragraph!</address>

You may look at that markup and say “Hey! You can’t fool me, only the <p> elements are “real” paragraphs!

You might even call out such elements as divs or spans being used as “paragraphs” a WCAG failure.

But, if you’re thinking those sorts of things, then maybe you’re not aware that those are actually all “paragraphs”.

It’s easy to forget this since many of those non-paragraph elements are not allowed in between paragraph tags and it usually gets all sorted out anyway when HTML is parsed.

The accessibility bits are what I always come to Scott’s writing for:

Those examples I provided at the start of this post? macOS VoiceOver, NVDA and JAWS treat them all as paragraphs ([asterisks] for NVDA, read on…). […] The point being that screen readers are in step with HTML, and understand that “paragraphs” are more than just the p element.

---

Paragraphs originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.